Unbounded nondeterminism

In computer science, unbounded nondeterminism or unbounded indeterminacy refers to a behavior in concurrency (multiple tasks running at once) where a process may face unpredictable delays due to competition for shared resources—such as a printer or memory—or have infinitely many options to choose from at a given point. While these delays or choices can be arbitrarily large, the process is typically guaranteed to complete eventually under certain conditions (e.g., fairness in resource allocation).

This concept, explored in abstract models rather than practical systems, became significant in developing mathematical descriptions of such systems (denotational semantics) and later contributed to research on advanced computing theories (hypercomputation).